People Plethora - Alcyonenews

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Miscellany

Posted July 25, 2025

People Plethora

Nowadays journalists and the rest ceaselessly talk and write about the scarcity of housing, the plethora of Food Banks and the abundance of new, “silent and clean”, purely electric and hybrid motorcars. The automobiles cruise the streets and the highways of the nation running in all directions, moving one or a couple of tons of steel, plastics and “genuine simulated leather upholstery”, to transport one or two hundred lbs of meat in the form of their driver.

Incidentally the “genuine simulated leather upholstery” was advertised fiercely post WWII and was burned into the hard drive of my mind in the uppermost part of my body. Likely you don’t remember it, either because it was discontinued before your first birthday or due to you being not attentive.

Thomas Malthus was an English chap, whom we all ought to know better than we do and to appreciate him correspondingly more than we do. Malthus looked around and became scared of what he saw. Too many babies were born, all crying out for food and shoes. Malthus did some number-crunching, I guess, and things of course looked worse. He figured the future was bleak, because the number of people was growing faster than the resources needed to sustain them.

Adroitly led by the Prophets-of-the-System, the people sidetacked Malthus beyond earshot so as to protect the Economy from his words. The more people that are born the more hands will be available to work the Economy when they reach adulthood. To keep it healthy, forever growing and increasingly profitable. The additional babies will need people to raise them and will “create” more jobs to build motorhomes, motorways, yachts, jails, submarines, cannons and so on.

The foremost ingredient necessary to keep this system churning, is “Consumers“. Ok, the notion needs be moderated because real consumers need that much of something and no more of it. To meet the insatiable thirst for profit satisfied and “prosperity” growing, the system devised ways and means to fool consumers into believing they need ever more things, “more of everything” and that the more they purchase the better citizens they become. With such tricks, the pillars of society averted Malthus and his followers reversing the treacherous population growth trend. At least for the time being.

But the economy went on an upswing. Blessed with a couple of fierce World wars and numerous lesser ones, and with the cities reduced to rubble thereby producing colossal rebuilding economic opportunities.

The armouries had to be rebuilt staffed with soldiers of all ranks and stuffed with plenty of ordinance and be ready to kill enemies, when available.

In 1967 John Kenneth Galbraith, published the “New Industrial State”, sort of a sequel to his “Affluent Society” which he had published in 1958. He exposed the practice of modern Industry to “manufacture consumer demand” before manufacturing a product. This being Artificial demand of course, creating, mostly if not always “Parasitic” jobs, thus keeping the Unemployment rate low. Which is good.

Perhaps a few words about Malthus’ world would be helpful. “Cruise barges” had not even been imagined, in Malthus’ time. Travel was extremely expensive and mighty onerous as asserted by the event of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”; and Jules Verne’s “Around the world in 80 days” and countless other titles. The “travelogue” industry was large, fuelled by the appeal of the unknown, but grossly inefficient in comparison to movies, videos and Google “Earth’s” pics. This is significant. This technology eliminates the facility to hide the “Affluent Society” the people of the “third world” can see and long for a Chevy Convertible and a 3-piece bathroom” with running water. And they demand such luxuries, without saying the “magic word”.

We are 8 Billion now living on this planet, is there enough clay to build loos for us all?